[quote=ucodegen]
Looks like laboratory confirmed numbers is 1,857 for the period 8/30/2009 to 1/23/2010 (lower 2/3s of the page), and this is all influenza deaths, including H1N1 over the period.[/quote]
One of the main reasons for this is that they just didn’t test very many people. A friend, who is the chief of internal medicine at a large local center city hospital, told me that through the middle of december, 100% of tested patients with flu symptoms tested positive for H1N1. It was the only flu around. But fewer than 10% of their patients were tested, including only 1 of the 3 in that hospital that had died.
I’m not aware of any significant non H1N1 flu populations yet. It’s still early. So the chances are high that close to 100% of those confirmed flu deaths would have been H1N1. So the extrapolation of the positive tests to the untested deaths from flu like sympoms is reasonable. Which is exactly what the CDC concluded.
